Languages in Poland

The official language of Poland is Polish. It is spoken by almost 43 million people of Poland. Polish is a Slavonic language and belongs to the West Slavic group, also includes Cassubian (or Kashubian), Czech, Slovak, Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany and Saxony) and Polabian, already extinct. Polish takes the second greatest total of speakers between Slavic languages after Russian. It is the primary representative of the Lechitic outgrowth of the West Slavic languages.

The Polish language started in the regions of contemporary Poland from various local Western Slavic dialects, mostly those spoken in Lesser Poland (spoken in the south and southeast) and Greater Poland (spoken in the west). It contributes some vocabulary with the languages of the contiguous Slavic nations, mostly with Belarusian, Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian. There are also some indigene speakers of Polish in eastern Lithuania, in western Belarus and Ukraine, northern Romania, southeastern Latvia and northeastern part of Czech Republic.

The Polish alphabet is established from the Latin alphabet only it utilizes diacritics. Compare to other Latin-symbol Slavic languages, Polish did not follow a version of the Czech orthography instead developed their own. The structure of Polish vowel is quite simple comprising of only 6 oral and 2 nasal vowels. On the other hand, the Polish consonants are more complex. It consists of a series of palatal and affricates consonants that derived from 4 Proto-Slavic palatalizations and 2 other palatalizations.

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